


Representation!!! On Ice: A Yuri!!! on Ice Fandom Study

by Harky21



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Academia, Anthropology, Fandom study, Other, also this does touch on fandom negativity, analysis of why people connect to yuri on ice and love it so much, it's only in its own section, many characters and pairings mentioned, please feel free to skip
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-27
Updated: 2019-05-27
Packaged: 2020-03-20 10:36:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,372
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18990964
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Harky21/pseuds/Harky21
Summary: This study was conducted as part of my ethnographic methods class project. I wanted to focus on how and why so many people love the show. To analyze this I conducted five interviews with fans, sent out a wide-reaching survey online, and collected social media (twitter and tumblr). This is a pilot study. I explain some decisions on my part in the notes. Thank you to everyone who participated!





	Representation!!! On Ice: A Yuri!!! on Ice Fandom Study

**Author's Note:**

> First off, this post is about a year and a half late. I planned on posting this right after I finished the study, but I wanted to edit it. That did not successfully happen and here I am in May and it's not done. I presented my research at Phoenix Fan Fusion and had more requests to read the paper, so I am now posing it. Please be aware, it is still not thoroughly edited (and I wrote half of it really late at night). It also is still in a form that may be more academic. As I study anthropology and have a Masters degree in it, I may use terminology that is unclear. Please comment or message me to ask about parts you don't understand. As this was originally given to a teacher who does not understand fandom, I had to define terms you all may be familiar with.
> 
> Also, the original social media posts that I used in my paper are not included. I did this based on privacy for the people who I collected from and because I do not have the permission from them at this time to include their words. 
> 
> I hope that this introduces a new and interesting lens for you all to look at fandom through. Once again please let me know if you have any questions, concerns, or comments.

**Introduction**

For a little over a year, _Yuri!!! on Ice_ has captured the hearts and creativity of many people for many reasons. _Yuri!!! on Ice_ , a Japanese anime, or cartoon, centers around the story of Japan’s ace men’s figure skater Yuuri Katsuki. The show sports an extremely diverse cast for an anime and is one of the top-grossing animes in 2016. It also is one of the first animes to have an openly homosexual relationship between the two main characters (Yuuri and Victor) without that being the focus of the show and being considered  _yaoi_ (a show or story focused specifically on a homosexual relationship). _Yuri!!! on Ice_ is considered a sports anime as the show focuses on Yuuri as an athlete and his trials and triumphs as he works his way to winning a medal at the Grand Prix Finals. This is coupled with his relationships with the people around him and learning how he is supported and loved. His relationship with Victor is one of the main focuses. Even after a year, the show has an extremely strong following of fans.  This fandom, or group of people who all have an interest in _Yuri!!! on Ice_ , are the focus of the study.

Due to the show’s popularity and success, I wanted to see what was special about the show, what drew people to the story and characters. To examine this, I conducted five semi-structured interviews with a variety of self-identified fans of the show. From those interviews, I used grounded theory to find emergent themes and then coded the interviews for those themes. I then used some of those codes to construct a survey that was distributed through social media. One of the free response questions was also coded with the emergent themes from the interviews to see if they came up as well. Over the course of the semester, I also collected screenshots of posts on Twitter and Tumblr to see what people identify with and talk about in an unprompted area. These screenshots were also coded for my five emergent themes- Community, Representation, Fandom Negativity, Positivity, and Inspiration. 

**Method and Analysis**

The methods used in this project were semi-structured interviews, a survey, and social media post collection. Semi-structured interviews are open-ended, but follow a general script of a list of topics created by the interviewer (Bernard 2011:156). This allows the interviewees to respond to questions openly and speak about what they feel is important. Interviewees may get off topic, but this can lead to other insights that the interviewer had not thought about or connections that they weren’t aware of. This interview method was used in all five interviews. Questions used were focused around general notions and interactions with fandom and anime and around the show and fandom for _Yuri!!! on Ice_. The interview guide was constructed to keep in mind why people connect to this show specifically and how it has impacted them as well as their interaction with the fandom community.

Interview participants were chosen using a mix of purposive and convenience sampling (Bernard 2011:145-147). Being a pilot study, I wanted to try and get participants who had a variety of backgrounds. Participants had different genders, ethnicities, and sexualities, all participants though were in their twenties and live in Arizona. I wanted a diverse set of interview participants in order to see whether themes that pulled them to the show had commonalities or differences. The convenience part of this sampling is that I chose people I already had contact with or who I met and collected contact information from at the Arizona anime convention Saboten Con. Due to this, all five interviewees live in Arizona which also made coordinating interview times easier. I conducted three of these interviews in person and two over Skype. Participants were not paid and all volunteered. _Yuri!!! on Ice_ is a passion and extracurricular for many people and being able to talk about the show with a fellow fan is considered fun and sharing views and involvement is beneficial to the participant.

The interviews were coded and analyzed using grounded theory. Grounded theory is a type of analysis method used mainly in inductive research (Berenard 2011:435). The five interviews were transcribed and then read. Sections that were thought to be important were highlighted. This form of analysis was used in order to see what themes emerged from what the participants perceived. I wanted to know how they as individuals viewed the show and how they feel it impacted them.

These highlighted sections were then reviewed and analyzed for emergent themes. Themes were then sorted into parent theme and child themes (Bernard 2011:430). The original themes coded for in the interviews were a community, canon representation (representation in the show), fanon representation (representation that fans include in fan works), fan creation, fandom negativity and a category for seemingly important things that didn’t fall into one of the previous four. After the analysis was completed and while trying to delineate findings more clearly, these were sorted into community, representation, fandom negativity, positivity, and inspiration.

The code for community was used for any mention of the word community as well as social interaction in person or digitally on social media platforms. Mentions of specific friends and groups interacted with in the fandom were also coded as well as participation in projects and sharing. Representation turned into a broader umbrella that included both canon and fanon representation. This category is one of the most varied. It includes representation of ice skating as a sport, healthy relationships, queer relationships, sexuality, mental health, body image, self-identification with specific characters, countries of origin, religion, and transgender characters. Religion and transgender characters are two codes found from fanon representation. Under fandom negativity, things like antis, witch hunts, and negative experiences in fandom were coded. Antis refer to fans who actively dislike a certain character or relationship that other fans like in a show. Antis message and heckle supporters of those characters and ships. Witch hunts refer to when a specific person or group of people in a fandom are targeted in a negative light and people go after them, sometimes in resulting in them being driven off of a social media platform or to become less active. Other things that came off as a bad experience or upset the interview participant that had to do with the fandom were coded as fandom negativity as well.

On the other side of this, many positive aspects related to the fandom and the show were also stated. When something in regard to the show was said that was positive and had a positive impact on them it was coded for positivity, same with fandom involvement. Inspiration was created mainly based off fan creation, but in the interviews, there were also mentions of new activities that they decided to try either because of the show or because they had wanted to before and just hadn’t yet, as well as how the show helped them in a very dark period of their lives. I coded these as inspiration because the show inspired them creatively, to make a change in their life, or start something new.

After these interviews were conducted, an internet-based survey was created based off some of the emergent themes seen in the interviews. An internet-based survey was chosen because a large portion of fandom activity takes place on the internet. Questions in this survey were focused on the emergent themes found from the interviews. The survey questions focus on fandom, community, and representation in the show. Some questions were multiple choice, some used a Likert scale, and a few were open-ended responses. Likert scale was used to see how much participants agreed with certain statements or themes and the open-ended responses were used to see reasons not listed for why participants answered certain questions. This also gave me a small view into why the show holds importance for people outside of the limitation of my five interviews as well as reach the global fanbase of the show.

The survey was internet based and created through Qualtrics. The link to the survey was then posted on both Twitter and Tumblr through my personal accounts. It remained open for two weeks and during that time collected 466 total responses from 47 countries, 398 of which were fully completed surveys. The fact that not all surveys were fully completed is one of the drawbacks of doing an Interviewer-absent self-administered questionnaire (Bernard 2011:192). However, despite this, an internet based-interview method creates an excellent place for snowballing (Bernard 2011:148-149) participants as the survey is reblogged or retweeted. This does, however, mean only certain spheres of this fandom may have seen the survey, but using a snowball method to collect participants reached far more people than I could have collected solely within my own social media networks. This survey was limited only to Tumblr and Twitter.

The questions were created to help get a broader view of fandom views on the themes present in the interview. Multiple choice questions were analyzed simply for percentages of what respondents replied. Likert questions were looked at to see the percentage of agree and strongly agree responses to them. Open questions in the survey were analyzed using a combination of grounded theory and content analysis. Due to time limitations, only one open-ended question was fully analyzed. This question was two parts. The first question is a multiple choice, yes no. “Is Yuri!!! on Ice a special show for you?” The second section was “If yes, please say why.” This set of questions, the last two in the survey, were chosen for analysis because if my emergent themes hold weight and are indeed significant they should be found in why they consider the show special. The first question received 398 answers, only 23 of which said that it was not a special show for them. Of the 375 respondents who replied yes, 329 left why the show was special. The main drawback in deciding to only look at this question is that I cannot see if the fandom negativity coding hold because this is a question that focuses on positive aspects of the fandom for the participant.

The free response question was analyzed using a combination of content analysis and grounded theory. Content analysis was used because I wanted to see how present the themes that emerged in the interviews were in why people think the show as special. If these themes are found in the answers for why the show is special, it makes them more prevalent in the fandom and more possibly a reason for why people are drawn to the show and have remained in the fandom. This is a case of using content analysis to confirm a hypothesis (Bernard 2011:446). To analyze this, I took the codes and related subcodes to search the responses. Responses that did not fall under my searches I went through individually to code. While coding surveys, I coded responses that did not fall under my predetermined codes as “Other.” Grounded theory analysis was used in these “other” responses as well to start noting reasons that were commonly cited for liking the show. Each response also could receive more than one code if more than one was cited in the responses. Percentages out of the total number of responses were then calculated.

The final method used in this study was a collection of 124 public social media posts over the course of two months. The collection of these posts started as a type of “field note” for me to track what was happening and being discussed in fandom. These posts were collected for a few reasons. One, it allowed me to track trends of what other fans were discussing and reactions to events in the fandom. Most importantly though it allowed me to see views of the show without prompting like in interviews and surveys. These posts were collected using purposive sampling from my social media accounts, which slightly biases the results because I am in a certain sphere of the fandom. I also chose posts that either mentioned something that caught my eye or that followed a trend I had been seeing in the fandom recently. I collected posts before and while I conducted interviews and they slightly overlap with survey collection. The social media posts also turned out to be valuable during these two months because it was the one-year anniversary of _Yuri!!! on Ice_. This prompted a trend on Twitter and Tumblr for people in the fandom to post their “ _Yuri!!! on Ice_ Story.” Many people wrote about how the show impacted them and their lives. This was invaluable in gaining a wider perspective of why the show is important to a number of people.  

These were analyzed purely deductively for the parent codes from the interviews using only content analysis. This was done in order to see if the codes and themes that emerged in an unprompted context. The unit of analysis was a twitter thread or Tumblr post. Two other codes were added to this section though. An “other” code for posts I collected that did not relate back to the parent themes and one for “fads” in the fandom, or when something is very popular for a short period of time. These tended to be focused around certain points in time and when all screenshots are looked at en masse, these “fad” periods can be easily identified through images in posts. I felt it important to note these due to the fact it certain things that were popular would come up in interviews and the fast pace of fandom.

The posts were all read and coded for the themes present in them that the post. A post could get more than one code, there was, in fact, one post that received all seven codes. After this percentage of mentions was calculated from the total number of posts to see how present a theme was in regular contexts in order to compare this to the prompted response in the interviews and surveys.

**Findings**

From the collected data of the interviews, surveys, and social media posts, all of the themes that emerged in the interviews appeared in the surveys and posts except for one, fandom negativity. It only emerged as a stronger theme in interviews with interviewees who had strong social media presences and in a few social media posts (two out of five were actually negative posts while three spoke about negativity in fandom). I still think it is important to look at this though because I have seen it online and it shapes experiences and how people interact or do not interact with the fandom. Fandom negativity was coded for things like antis, witch hunts, and negative experiences in fandom were coded under this.

Fandom negativity in this pilot study is mentioned by participants from either having seen or experienced it. It seems to focus around certain topics and in my social media posts, it’s spoken against as it is when brought up in my interviews. One interview discusses negativity toward the show. While and after airing, there were debates about whether Victor and Yuuri were canonically gay characters, before the creators right out stated it. As the interviewee began to see Yuuri and Victor’s relationship grow in the show she says, “I still remember that [people denying Yuuri and Victor’s relationship] was kind of the initial thing that really bothered me when the show was coming out and like I understood at that point like this is good representation that it seeing other people say that it was like not was really stressful for me” (Interview 3). This shows how the impact of having a piece of representation be said to not be true that the interviewee saw in the show was a negative and hurtful experience for them. This participant also identifies as LGBTQ+ so seeing that was important to her and there was another part of the fandom that was rejecting that. This is an example of negativity that is associated with the story.

Other pieces of fandom negativity are more related to ships (relationships in the show between characters). One of my interviewees really likes two characters, Yurio and Otabek together. These characters have a three-year age difference (Yuri is 15 about to turn 16 and Otabek just turned 18) and due to this, there is a part of the fandom that dislikes it and calls it pedophilia. The interviewee has been on the receiving end of these antis. Her response is “I don't understand why people hate so much, it's like... have a little happiness in your life, don't always, don't have your corner of fandom be just pure hate and vitriol it's horrible. Like I'm in fandom to be happy” (Interview 2). This is important because she says, “I’m in fandom to be happy.” I think many people are in fandom to be happy and want to have good experiences, but others can take that away with their actions by actively disliking what other people do like. The three interviews that bring up fandom negativity all say in some way that they think people should be allowed to like what they like and if you don’t like something to just ignore it.

The tweet below also shows how large generalizations about parts of the fandom can be made and in a negative light. The context of this post is that a doujin, a fan-made comic, that had very dark themes that not everyone liked and wasn’t ever supposed to be posted on the internet, was targeted in a witch hunt and people tried to tell the creators of _Yuri!! on Ice_ about it. This causes a bit of a fan war over the acceptability of this and pitted sides against each other. In this case, it’s targeting the Western fandom. The post exemplifies how people can be targeted negatively online and while these negative aspects appear every now and then and can have a large impact at the time, they usually fizzle out rather quickly. For example, this particular controversy lasted less than a week.

The other themes that came out in the interviews, surveys, and social media posts are all much more positive. I will first focus on my coded themes and finding in this section and add other themes that emerged later but were not coded for. Once again, these themes are community, representation, fandom negativity, positivity, and inspiration.

“Community” in this study was coded for the mention of the word community as well as social interaction in person or on social media platforms. Mentions of specific friends and groups interacted with in the fandom were also coded as well as participation in projects and sharing. Four out of five of my interviews, when asked what their definition of fandom is, used the word community or group in it. All five of the interviews mention community in some way in regard to _Yuri!!! on Ice_ and fandom. One interviewee, when asked if they feel fandom is a social or individual activity replied, “I think that the idea of fandom is really the togetherness of it.” (Interview 4) This expresses how fandoms are interpreted as communities at a basic level.

Another interviewee, while talking about how _Yuri!!! on Ice_ compares to other fandoms, mainly the Harry Potter fandom, they replied “It’s smaller. It’s more online for mee… _Yuri!!! on Ice_ fandom, y’know part of it is that it’s newer for me. Uuh so it hasn’t been around as long, buut I have my group, I have my people, and so I and they’re people I interact with every day. All the time.”  (Interview 2) This statement exemplifies how although _Yuri!!! on Ice_ fandom is based online, people still make very strong connections and friendships although they are in different places.

The surveys also support the view of the _Yuri!!! on Ice_ fandom as a community. One Likert survey question asked whether the participants agreed with the statement that “The _Yuri!!!_ on Ice fandom is a community.” 382 out of 460 respondents agreed or strongly agreed with this statement. In addition to 83% of respondents agreeing it’s a community, 40 out of 329 open-ended responses for why _Yuri!!!_ _On Ice_ is special to them mentioned community in some way. One of the forty responses that mention community reads “As I get older, this [making friends] is harder to do… Honestly, I'm pretty lonely irl [in real life], so YoI [Yuri on Ice] giving me back a sense of community after I'd felt cutoff for a long time was huge last year.” This quote shows how people have been able to connect specifically through this show and how it impacted their lives positively.

Community also came up unprompted in 20 out of 124 twitter posts. Many of these examples were around the one year anniversary and how the show impacted the poster’s life. In the post below a few different impacts as well as community.

The tweet has two different mentions of community aspects. First, the introduction to nice people who then became close friends and second, a cool community. This show, similar to the second interview quote above, that the twitter account has some special friends that come from the show.

The next code, representation, includes both canon and fanon representations. This category is one of the most varied. It includes representation of: ice skating as a sport, healthy relationships, queer relationships, sexuality, mental health, body image, self-identification with specific characters, countries of origin, religion, and transgender characters. Religion and transgender characters are represented in fandom creations, not the show itself. Due to representation being such a large and varied category, I am going to focus specifically on the two largest categories noted in the interviews and surveys, anxiety and depression and LGBTQ+. These two categories were also included in Likert survey responses as well.

In the show, there are depictions of anxiety and depression from multiple characters, but the main protagonist, Yuuri, has both and his struggle to conquer them is a main focus of the show. In the interviews four out of five mention anxiety or depression, three of these in reference to Yuuri Katsiki and one in reference to another character JJ Leroy. In reference to talking about the period when one interviewee watched the show, they said that at the time they were not in a good place mentally, “And just being able to see that represented on television with Yuuri, I was like oh my god. That’s exactly how I feel right now, depressed, I don’t know where I’m going with my life, what’s going on, bulubulah” (Interview 4). They go on to talk about the positivity of the show and how watching Yuuri do something he loved meant a lot to them as a person.

Another interview participant related to Yuuri’s anxiety. “I also have really bad anxiety. So it's like it's really nice to see that in like represented in the stuff that I like cause it's like ‘Wow, Hey this is a real thing that other people experience and go through” (Interview 3). This quote shows how they see as the representation as good for other people to see how a person with anxiety experiences the world, and the emotions they go through. So the representation becomes a way to help them show others what they go through with anxiety.

This connection is also backed up in the survey. 350/413 responses to asking if _Yuri!!! on Ice_ has a good representation of depression and anxiety said yes and 350/412 respondents said they have experienced depression while 375/412 said have experienced anxiety. In all three categories it is over half and closer to ¾ of participants who see this in the show. Even more interesting is that 294/412, about 70%, say that _Yuri!!! on Ice_ helps/helped them with their anxiety and/or depression. In the open question section, 138/329 responses have mention of anxiety, depression, or mental health as well.

Twitter posts also support how seeing a character that shows anxiety and depression helped them realize they weren’t abnormal and seeing someone else succeed and be treated with respect while having anxiety and depression made them feel like they could belong in the world.

I think this data shows how important accurate and relatable representation of mental health issues can be. It validates people who have mental health issues to see that they can achieve great things like the main character, and it gives a window into their experiences for people who do have not experienced it.

Representation of an LGBTQ couple is the second piece of representation in the show that seems to have had a large impact and draw for fans. One interviewee had refused to watch the show when their partner suggested they should because they really don’t like sports anime. Once he watched it though they said they loved it and one of the reason was because the relationship he saw between Yuuri and Victor on screen resembled his own with his boyfriend.

“It really helped [him enjoy the show] that... his personality is like Victor's and mine is like Yuuri's and the way they interact with each other and they're supportive and they love each other is very similar how we are” (Interview 5). Seeing a relationship in the show that he could connect to was an important component to why he enjoyed media content he usually didn't.

Another sentiment present in interviews and in surveys I saw was the fact the Yuuri and Victor’s relationship is natural. “They’re allowed I guess the term would be, they’re allowed to be gay” (Interview 4) was the continuation of the thought that in the show the fact that Yuuri and Victor love each other just isn’t a big deal.  A survey response echoes this sentiment by stating “The show also highlights an LGBT couple in a way that is subtle and doesn't have to be explicitly stated, normalizing the couple in a heteronormative society.”

The posting collected on social media also supports the importance of LGBTQ+ representation in the show. 16% of my collected posts mention representation in any form, but LGBTQ+ related ones were common, like the example below.

In this tweet, it expresses how little the writer of the post expected because LGBTQ+ representation usually isn’t done well in media. The last part of the post also exemplifies how the show impacted them as a person who identifies as gay and the show helped them embrace that part of their identity.

In both cases of representation of mental illness and in LGBTQ+, fans of the show were able to connect on very personal levels from their own experiences to the characters. They also were able to see what they want the world to know and understand about them. For people who have anxiety and depression it is the experience and how it affects them. For people who identify as LGBQT+ it’s that their relationships are normal and loving and they don’t have to be compared or related to heterosexual relationships to be valid.

The next theme I coded for is positivity. When something regarding the show was said that was positive or had a positive impact on them it was coded for positivity, same with fandom involvement. This included words like the show makes them happy, gives them hope, ect. All the interviews had variations of positivity associated to the show. One response echoed a sentiment I saw in many survey replies as well. About it being just a good feel-good show. The quote is discussing the interviewees favorite part of the show. “It's very warm it’s just like the way that it ended made me very happy so, it was just satisfying and if it stopped right there I would be happy” (Interview 3). She’s saying that the ending was warm and happy and made her happy as well. The show gives the interviewee positive feelings.

The next example of positivity is from when an interviewee was describing a memory she associated with the show.

“Seeing episode 7 kinda reminds me of like those last few week leading up to the episode that were just absolutely horrible and then episode seven pops in and then you're like "Everything is good and wholesome in the world and I don't even care cause this is more important."” (Interview 1)

This quote is an example of how the show can have a positive impact at a difficult time. Both quotes also show that _Yuri!!! on Ice_ is uplifting and makes the individuals feel better.

This positivity was also evident in why people love the show 118 out of 346 responses mention _Yuri!!! on Ice_ in a positive way. Some of these responses even use positive in their responses. “It has helped me with my depression and anxiety in a moment when I was hurting. It is a great positive show and makes me happy to watch.” This response is similar to the both interview quotes. It made the viewer happy in a difficult time and it made them happy.

Positivity can also be seen on social media. Fandom positivity and encouraging messages that people get from the show. In the case of this tweet it has to do with body positivity. Since Yuuri is overweight at the beginning and it has been taken in a positive light by the fans, it’s validating and a good message for this tweeter.

Positivity is also very closely entwined with the next code, inspiration. Inspiration was created as a theme mainly based off fan creation, but in the interviews and surveys, there were also mentions of new activities that participants decided to try either because of the show or because they had wanted to before and hadn’t yet. I also include inspiration for when people talk about how the show helped to bring them out of a dark part of their lives. I coded these as inspiration because the show inspired them creatively, to make a change in their life, or start something new.

For one interviewee, _Yuri!!! on Ice_ and the fandom inspired them to start writing again. She was describing how she hadn’t written in a while and after reading a fanfiction she wanted to write more about the story another author had written. “ … and I just posted a comment saying how much I loved it and can I write something… and she just said absolutely yes please do link me when you do it, which is really cool, so that's how I got into writing for the Yuri on Ice fandom” (Interview 2). This shows how the shows characters and fans inspire one another to create. Another interview also discussed how they create mainly for themselves and come up with new ideas because “It’s just fun” (Interview 1). A Twitter post also echoes how the show inspired creativity in an author and created community for them.

Another type of inspiration the show gives is perseverance. The survey had 37 out of 329 responses cite how the show inspired them somehow. While this is a smaller occurrence than some other themes, the impacts of them seem significant to the respondents.

This show made me want to succeed. It helped me through grad school last year and I graduated even with submitting things late. It also showed that I should never give up, even when odds are against me and to push my own limits.

This show gave this participant energy and inspired them to push themselves further. This kind of message is important because by relating to the story and seeing their own struggles reflected and conquered, they feel they can do the same.

Many survey responses, interview answers, and tweets combine multiple themes as reasons that the love the show. This can be seen in many of the previous examples given from this survey response that includes representation, positivity and community. “It's special to me because of its representation and how it deals with anxiety and depression. It's also a very positive and sweet show that helped me go through a lot and gave me so much happiness that I haven't felt in a while and connected me to a lot of lovely people.”

**Discussion**

There were limitations to this project in each section. Only having interviewed five individuals there could other themes that would have appeared more readily had I interviewed a larger number of people. However, the themes from these interviews can be found in both the surveys and the social media postings in more than single incidences.

The survey was created based on only some of the themes, so even though many people replied and participated in it only views on some of what appeared in arose in the interviews. The surveys were however helpful in gaining a larger perception of _Yuri!!! on Ice_ ’s impact on a larger number of people. It also helped to identify more themes that I did not code for in my interviews and, in some cases, like the show just being a good story, did not think to code for even though I saw them in interviews too.

The limitation of my social media post collecting mainly comes from the fact I was only looking at my own accounts. I have a bias towards certain content, accounts that like the same ships that I do, certain art styles, ect. I also dislike accounts that have a lot of negativity and drama in them, so I tend not to follow those. The screenshots were also taken at my own judgment and what I thought seemed interesting.

The last limitation I had was time. I was unable to analyze the full survey and for more themes. I believe more would have arisen from the survey responses if I had more time to analyze them. Also if I had collected more tweets over a longer period as well and started looking for the emergent themes, more may have come from that as well.

Despite these limitations important insights into this fandom were made. The first I believe is that representation in media means a lot. For people to be able to see themselves in a character or situation makes it so that they see they aren’t the only ones going through what they’re going through. Seeing a piece of their life on screen validates their experiences and just that does so much, but then coupled with it being viewed positively, or not in a stereotypical way adds even more. I think that this study has shown that, if anything, representation and positivity are important and they empower people. I think potentially that the positivity of the show was also heightened for some viewers because it aired at a time in their lives when they needed a positive message.

_Yuri!!! on Ice_ also created a community. For some of my survey respondents the community is the main reason the show is so special for them. _Yuri!!! on Ice_ created a space for people to connect and bond over their love of the show, but that led to other discussions as exemplified in my second interview. There were individuals who even met their significant others due to this show. The community surrounding the show is some people support system. However, all aspects of the community are not positive exemplified by the fandom negativity. I think it would be very interesting to do another survey that included some questions for people on whether they perceive fandom negativity, have received it, or if they would ever admit they’d partaken in it. Looking at what some interviewees cited as an age divide in fandom would also be very interesting.

Future research that could come from this pilot study is a more in-depth study focused on the importance of representation in the show to fans or to expand the number of participants to see is representation still holds or if there are more aspects of people lives they see viewed in the show. Another interesting facet of research is to delve more into the characters and storylines and how fans connect to them. One of the “Other” reasons most cited in the survey was liking how the characters were “real,” “multifaceted,” and “relatable.” This also appeared in social media posts and just recently in a conversation I had with some fanfiction writers. It seems that the writing and character development also played a role in this shows success as did many other factors. This show is engaging in many different ways which seems to allow many fans to connect to the show and to each other in a variety of ways.

Looking more into how people interact with this kind of media and what makes this media special and allows audiences to connect to it is important for not only media outlets but also for parents and other relations of people who interact with it. It would also be beneficial to see what trends hold people in other fandoms to see if there are any consistent reasons people are attracted to shows despite their differences. 

**Conclusion**

From this analysis, I learned that while there are many reasons people love the show _Yuri!!! on Ice_ , there are some certain aspects of the show that stand out more and come up repetitively. These are community, representation, positivity, and inspiration. Fandom negativity is also evident, but when discussing reasons why the show is special or interaction with others it does not appear. The positive aspects of the fandom and why people love the show also appear to overlap and tie together. The fandom community can inspire just as much as the show can. Representation creates a positive space for people to make connections and friends. Community, representation, positivity, and interaction all seem to play strong roles in the data presented. With more research looking at how much importance these types of themes and subthemes hold for viewers, as well as the fandom communities built around them, creating more media with content like this can have even more of a positive impact on peoples' lives.

**Author's Note:**

> If you are interested in YoI, anthropology, fandom, ect or ust want to ask questions follow me on twitter @mooncatcher21!


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